Welcoming Curator in Residence Eva Rowson

22 February 2019

Eva Rowson is joining Lighthouse for a six month placement as Curator in Residence. As well as offering a platform for different voices, our Curators in Residence programme helps us to bring new energy and artistic influences to Lighthouse, and enables us to be more responsive to cultural shifts. In this post Eva introduces herself and what she has planned for her time in Brighton.

I’m so happy to be joining Lighthouse as Curator in Residence! Lighthouse’s supportive approach to testing ideas and collaborations with lots of different people and practices is a really exciting context for me. At Lighthouse I’ll be developing a programme for Re-Imagine Europe, a four-year project with ten European cultural organisations to imagine radical approaches to developing new audiences and ways of working, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Artists will be invited to develop projects in response to these ambitions, thinking about alternative organisational models, ways of communicating and forms of hospitality – taking root in the Lighthouse building and its local networks.

My programme for Lighthouse continues from a series of artist commissions developed at Bergen Kunsthall (Norway) in 2018 – the Norwegian partner for Re-Imagine Europe – under the title ’Who’s doing the washing up?‘. The title was used to address questions that so often go unasked by institutions and grant-makers when imagining ’radical’ new models: Who gets to have a voice in these re-imaginings? How are different types of work – from the artists to the cleaning – valued in future organisations? And how do we actually change the infrastructures we’re working in so we don’t just reproduce the same models, narratives and values?

Artists Jordi Ferreiro, Aliyah Hussain, Anna Bunting-Branch, Maia Urstad and Anton Kats – alongside new commissions – will continue their lines of research drawing on experimental education movements, feminist science-fiction, radio and constructed languages. These will develop through different forms including workshops, interventions and re-imaginings of the uses and workings of the Lighthouse building itself.